On Classy Cancellations and Can-Creative Wonkery

IN THE GLOBE today, Mary Leckie's quoted about the demise of CBC's hockey-themed MVP:

"Seventy per cent of the audience was in the 25-54 age group," she said. "I think we created a fabulous brand with MVP. It looks like a world-class show and has been sold to several countries already. I think CBC did its best with the show, but I did think they'd stick with us a little longer. This is a tough business and I can't slam anyone. We move on. "

That, ladies and germs, is how you do that. Note perfect quote. Graceful and upbeat.

It's funny, because the chatter has already started about how this is an unusually decisive move for CBC. Everyone always talks about how series in Canada get two seasons whether they deserve it or not. That's not been my experience, but it says something about CBC -- something good, I think, that they're willing to cut losses and move on with something else. Maybe it means they feel they've got something else in development that might connect more. I don't know. We'll find out in a few weeks, I guess.

The thing about Leckie's gracious quote is that it's sadly, not usually the norm. Engage a Canadian TV reviewer from one of the newspapers off the record, and they'll tell you of the usual response to a bad review -- a storm of drive-by-carping by peeved Producers, whiny writers, and raging relatives of the show creators. I've heard directly from ink-stained wretches who exited the racket because they just couldn't take it anymore.

And yet, without a more honest dialogue about quality, and what it means, how can any of us expect to start forging the only conversation that really matters -- the one with our audience?

I've recently had a drive-by carping over something I wrote about a show. That kind of thing always fills me with despair. We need more people willing to give a quote like Leckie, then shutup, and go back to the tickle trunk and come up with the next thing. That's the thing about ideas, theyr'e supposed to be endlessly renewable, right?

The other chatter that's starting to surface, is the predictable carp of regionalism. Both J-Pod and Intelligence were west-coast based series. I've read at least one analysis already that's trying to fan the flames of "centre of the universe" Toronto vs. "the Left Coast."

Poppycock. Don't buy it. Dollars to doughnuts, expect at least one of CBC's new series, when they're finally announced, to be a west-coaster. I think that's probably a given.

Meantime, this entry sparked a thoughtful reply from nouveau blogger and Canadian Director Ken Girotti (Mayerthorpe, Rescue Me, The Border, Law & Order:SVU)

You bring an interesting point on the "taste" front, Denis. Here in Canada we have been moving toward, what...more "market friendly" film and TV? Well I think that can be read (and certainly is by many) to mean "American style." I just took a look at the pilot for "Sniper" and it's terrific. Hugh Dillon is wonderful to watch. And there's definitely a Canadian sensibility in the theme of (spoiler coming) a sniper making the kill that rocks his confidence and, I'm assuming, will rock his world as the series progresses. But it definitely has a bit of an American sensibility. Lots of gun-porn. Pretty people. And the principal cast was almost entirely white guys. This in a show that's supposedly set in the world's most multicultural city. Perhaps they were making a statement against tokenism...I don't know. But there sure were a lot of white people on the screen.

But I digress. For the American viewer much of what's on offer year after year on the main nets lines up behind itself -I mean it starts to all look the same. One hit gets all the other networks rushing to jump on the thematic, stylistic or conceptual bandwagon. Perhaps that makes the more savvy (or bored) viewer go in search of something different. HBO, FX Networks etc, provide the antidote to that sameness. I guess I worry a bit that the "market friendly" direction we're taking in Canada could become a blessing and a curse. It gets us market share, but at what cost?

I'm an entertain 'em first, deliver the message later guy for sure, and I've spent quite a bit of time south of the border shooting all that filler between commercials. But even down there is a hunger to set things apart. There's less and less an appetite to ape the success stories and a real drive to cut a new path...and this is the vibe I get in the meeting rooms of the network shows I've shot!

If, as you suggest, there's great danger in a supposed difference of taste between here and the country we love and hate to our south, I'd like to suggest that perhaps it's the American viewer whose sophistication may be more highly evolved. If the only shows (I'm being provocative here) we can sell down there, and more importantly, sell to the Canadian viewing public are the ones fit that "line up behind the winner" mold, how can we continue to distinguish ourselves in that 1000 channel universe? Do we need to? Should everything look the same?

And as I suggest, perhaps even more frightening is the notion that the only Canadian shows with a snowball's hope in hell of being successful in their own country are the shows that look and feel (wish I knew how to italicize) American.

I'm just spit-balling here. I guess I'd like is to cling as closely as we can to what makes us different and Terminal City was a show that was just different. It's a grey area, it's completely subjective, but at the end of the day I think the trade off bears examining. Yeah, we want bums in the seats but there's more to making that happen than just putting something up on the screen.

I ranted here before about how little promotion my movie "Mayerthorpe" got. It scored very respectably in spite of that. Watching the Oscars and seeing promos for eps of Housewives and ER which weren't slated to air for SEVEN weeks pissed me off. My movie got a week of promotional attention. One week.

It's a bad hypothetical example because it was on TMN (and you hated it), but here goes anyway: what would Terminal City have done with enough publicity and exhibition on one of Canada's main webs? Hmmmm?

Few housekeeping points above: the "Sniper" pilot that Ken refers to was the original pilot for the CTV show now known as "Flashpoint." I agree that it's pretty great. It shows the aftermath of a shooting and its effect on Dillon's character in a way that I don't think I've ever seen in a U.S. show.

I try to test things on various people to see sometimes if my taste isn't leading me astray. I showed that pilot to a friend who, though they are in the business, doesn't work on hour dramas, and in fact, doesn't watch too many of them - and he agreed it was pretty compelling.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I should also say that the writers of that pilot are two dear friends of mine, and I did a bit of consulting on the show prior to it getting picked up for series by CTV.)

Ken raises, I think, a whole raft of really great questions. They're the kind of questions we all could really tuck into, I think, if we Canadian creatives didn't have to spend all our time responding to crap like this and this. I don't necessarily have a lot of answers to the questions Ken raises. But I know it's a conversation worth having.

Anyway, let's see. I think one of the problems is a lack of precision in what we're really aiming for. Ken asks, "what would Terminal City have done with enough publicity and exhibition on one of Canada's main webs?"

I think it probably would have bombed hard. But that's not the point. Because whether you liked Terminal City or not, to me it just doesn't feel like a big network show. Sundance in the USA is a tiny cable channel, so something like Terminal City or Slings & Arrows can score without drawing big numbers.

To me, part of that branding strategy is: are we, like Ken suggests, trying to create big, American style, broad based network-y hit shows? Then those shows should be marketed and judged like those shows. That was certainly the case with The Border, and MVP.

Or, taking a page from when those dispassionate American critics judge Canadian shows and praise their "different'ness" -- is it okay for CBC or CTV or Global to have a show that's more like a cable show -- character driven, a bit edgier or more challenging? For CBC it's a mandate issue, and for CTV and Global, face it, it's going to always be a, "make the best of something you have to do" issue. There's something to be said if a show attracts interest from a cable channel in the USA. In the USA, cable shows have lower audience number expectations, which are made up for by lower budgets, and hopefully, a metric of success that involves things like a good demographic. No one would claim that AMC scored a ratings Bonanza with Mad Men, but it's back because, though the audience was small (1 million an ep - a very Canadian number) a whole shitload of that one million was people making over 100K a year who like to buy Lexuses and "Talk to Chuck."

There is a certain logic toward aiming for these kinds of cable successes here, even on our over-the-air nets -- because the reality is that that's the budget level we have to play with. Those broad American style hits DO rely on gun porn, and big action set pieces -- four of them an episode, and lots of locations and lots of fast moving hoo-hah. And when we take the field with a "big budget" Canadian show that is less than half the budget of a U.S. show, who are we kidding that we can compete with that? British shows don't. Even a "high budget" British program like Spooks (MI:5) or Life on Mars, has a budget (and an action level) closer to Canadian shows than American shows. And -- here's the thing -- they don't play on U.S. networks either.

But that would require finetuning how we see things and how we market the shows. It would mean not muddling up how we frame things. Global ran The Best Years at 10pm. It wasn't a 10pm show. I read reviews of the show that took it on like it was NYPD Blue. It wasn't. It was a show that ran on ABC Family in the USA. And apparently, that audience responded well to it. But here it wasn't marketed that way. The whole expectations of the show were hopelessly confused. No wonder the audience didn't find it.

I'm not sure that Jpod, even if it was a half hour like it should have been, EVER would have drawn a "Canadian network" big number. It was specialized and weird. But don't you think it's significant that it started to do better when it was moved to a fringe-ier timeslot on a Friday night?

I've been in tons of meetings where the network person references "Six Feet Under," or "Deadwood," or any one of another number of cool, interesting, niche-y shows -- and then in the next breath talks about how the slot they're thinking about is 8pm on a Wednesday and, oh, by the way, it has to draw 800 000 viewers in Canada. Well, there's a profound disconnect there. It's just not got anything to do with the realities of the TV business.

I think what's needed is a consistent project-by-project set of rules and expectations that everybody gets. I think that CTV or Global should be able to say, "we love this project, but this is kind of going to be like our in-house cable show." And then do that show, and when it gets 300 000 viewers, say, whatever, that's fine -- look at the demos... Market the damn thing like, "if you lived in the USA, you'd have to subscribe to HBO to see something like this. But we're the channel that brought you The Sopranos for free, damnit."

I think the CBC should be able to say, "Hey, we love Intelligence, and it only gets 250 000 viewers. And that's fine. Because look at who those viewers are."

Unless, you know, they're not that desirable demo. Then, you know...(slashing motion across throat.)

Right now, nobody has a clear idea of the types of shows they want or how to deliver the shows they ask for.

• Networks have to stop asking for a 4 million dollar per episode show on a 1 million dollar budget, for which they're only kicking in 300K.

• People have to stop promising CSI numbers for a show whose whole DNA is a niche cable show.

• Stars and Producers have to know what to say, and how to say it, so that their show is well-branded. We have to be message-focused, and not see things in print that creates audience confusion about the brand.

Now that the internet means that the numbers for this or that show leak every week, it's just added chum (as opposed to CHUM) to the waters.

We need to line up the material, with the expectations for the material, and carry that through to the marketing of the material, the promotion of the material, and the foreign sales positioning of the material.

In other words, it's time to get into the television business. For real. That's what I think, anyway. What do y'all think of Ken's questions? Rumble in below.